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What did I just read? That was insane! A crazy ride to crazy town and then some. Thanks for recommending this Mort 😊.

The opening scene hits you like a sledge hammer and it never lets up. Mary Terrell aka Mary Terror was part of a radical left wing group in the 60s called the Storm Front. Their raison d’être was to kill the agents of the Mindfuck state (ie the ‘pigs�� and others in authority) Well, they were pretty high on drugs, acid mainly and any number of other things most of the time. Their leader Jack Gardiner aka Lord Jack was a charismatic guy who convinced his rag-tag bunch of followers to shoot, bomb and otherwise sow mayhem for a number of years until most of them were killed in a shootout in 1972. But Mary survived, horribly injured and losing the baby she was carrying at the time but she somehow got away and now lives a mean and miserable existence, working at a Burger King, obsessed with having a baby and thoughts of the past.

Then, around 20 years later, she sees a ‘message�� in Rolling Stone magazine that she interprets is from Jack calling the faithful together again. This is what she’s been waiting for all this time. But she can’t go to Jack without his baby. Don’t have a baby? No problem, just take somebody else’s. In case you hadn’t guessed yet Mary isn’t just bad, she’s also as mad as a hatter. It’s a bit of a spoiler but it happens very early in the book. So she grabs Laura Claybourne’s baby, David. And that is her mistake. She picked the wrong mother! Laura will do anything, and I mean anything, to get her baby back. And so the chase begins.

It’s a cross country marathon drive with neither woman prepared to give and inch. The action never stops, lots of people die along the way but no quarter is given and no prisoners are taken (both literally and figuratively). It is quite a long book and I might have given it 5 stars but I thought the cross country chase went on just a little too long. Nevertheless a belter of a book (literally and figuratively), very well written and it really evokes the period, I mean it should as it was published in about 1991. Still it doesn’t seem dated. The characters were very detailed and almost felt real, although I’d hope never to meet a Mary Terror! I’ve already read Boy’s Life and I would be open to reading more from McCammon.